Ushr Calculator

Zakat on agricultural produce — 10% naturally irrigated, 5% artificially irrigated

Ushr is Zakat's agricultural counterpart — a religious obligation on crop produce, calculated at a rate that depends specifically on how the crop was irrigated, and separate from both standard Zakat on wealth and from provincial agricultural income tax, which is a secular tax obligation rather than a religious one.

Why irrigation method determines the rate

Ushr is charged at 10% of yield on naturally irrigated land (rain-fed, or watered by rivers/streams without artificial effort) and at 5% of yield on artificially irrigated land (requiring wells, tube wells, canals with paid water access, or other mechanical/paid irrigation effort) — the underlying principle being that produce grown with less human cost and effort owes a proportionally higher share than produce that required significant investment in irrigation infrastructure to bring to harvest. Below the nisab threshold, conventionally cited as 5 Wasq (a specific quantity of staple grain), Ushr isn't obligatory on that crop at all — similar in structure to how Zakat has a wealth threshold below which nothing is owed, though the specific measure (crop weight rather than currency value) is different.

A worked example

The same crop yield, valued at the same market price, owes double the Ushr if naturally irrigated compared to artificially irrigated — a farmer relying on canal or tube-well irrigation pays half the rate of one relying purely on rainfall, which reflects the different labour and cost burden each irrigation method represents rather than any difference in the crop's market value.

How this connects to your other agricultural obligations

Ushr is a religious obligation, entirely separate from Agricultural Income Tax, which is a secular provincial tax on agricultural income administered by each province's Board of Revenue — a farmer can owe both simultaneously, since one doesn't substitute for or reduce the other, and they're calculated under completely different frameworks (Ushr by crop weight and irrigation method, agricultural income tax by provincial income slabs or a per-acre alternative).

Common mistakes

Farmers sometimes apply a single Ushr rate across their entire harvest without distinguishing which specific plots or crops were naturally versus artificially irrigated — since the rate genuinely differs by irrigation method, and a single farm can legitimately use different irrigation approaches on different plots, the correct calculation requires tracking irrigation method at the plot or crop level rather than applying one blanket rate to total yield.